the south and that i do feel that like eleanor, hick was -- grew a lot, and i also think that on the basic a human one-to-one level, that hick was a very compassionate person herself had such poverty and struggle that she understood it in others so just a little defense of hick here. >> well, i'd like to thank you all for a very enlightening and entertainment segment. [applause] >> blanche cook is going to-- is heading up to san francisco for the wedding of a godchild and so she will not be able to make the book signing session. but that book's going to be on sale and you can find it easily enough. i can't promise you that she'll come over to your house. >> but i'll sign it in any way

i can. >> thank you very much. [applause]. >> thank you. thats with a great, thank you so much.

>> and back tv on c-span 2 is live at the los angeles times festival of books, it's held on campus of university of southern california. it's been here for the last several years. prior to that held at ucla. it's currently in its 22nd year. now, we've got a full day of coverage coming up in about a half hour is a panel on the republican party, hugh hewitt, the radio talk show host, cory fields who writes about black republicans and peggy grande who served as ronald reagan's executive assistant after he left the white house will be on the panel. that's in a half hour. here on the set on the campus we're joined by authority and professor michael eric dyson, the latest book "tears we cannot stop." . doctor, why did you make this a sermon to white america. >> for america, you don't know

i left crazy messages for peter flynn and loves me and he's a great man. i wanted to say that. i wanted to write this book because i think it's time for honest discourse and conversation between black and white america. i don't represent all of black america and white america is diverse, i understand that, but what i'm trying to say from my heart to the heart of white america. i wanted to talk about issues of police brutality and racial discourse, i wanted to be honest about the fact that we feel deeply entrenched. white fragility and white in the age of trump not being politically correct. can you take that both ways? can you also as white americans endure the onslaughten honest, brutality frank conversation for hopefully an articulate black american saying this is the stuff we want to say behind your back and i want to talk about it in front of your face

and these are the challenges i want to levy and the conversation i want to engage by being open and honest in the way that often doesn't occur. not nasty, not preaching from the pulpit. i'm not that kind of preacher. i believe in getting in the trenches with the people, what can we do to lift the burden to make things peter. >> michael eric dyson is also an ordained minister. in your book you write, whiteness grows more shameless, more cruel, more uncaring by the day. >> yes, i think that that's a tough statement, but i think when we look at this present white house, it's hard to deny. i think, quite frankly, that donald trump is the face of white innocence of the aggressive white privilege that's often not interrogated. after all, we have' just passed a tax day and most americans have to show their-- pay their taxes and prove that they did if they're in public office, not donald trump. donald trump, to me, represents symbolically the face of a whiteness unconscious of its privilege.

you know the old saying, you were born on third base and think you hit a triple. when i think about whiteness growing harsher every day, despite the fact that mr. trump says i want to reach out to black america. we've got an attorney general who is singlehandedly rolling back many gains under the obama administration in record to police hostility and police tensions, with black and brown communities. or working out the better relations between law enforcement and black and brown communities. is withdrawing of support is being jeff sessions of the department of justice in regards to taking on texas in regards to its i.d. laws, we think if not unconstitutional, certainly against the nature of progressive freedom and democracy that voting should betoken. we look at steve bannon in the white house, even though he's increasingly marginalized he represents the alt-right voice. to me it's to acknowledge

whiteness collectively as an institution has been quite brutal in america, not only to black, brown, red, yellow people, but to white people as well. this was supposedly a refrn dumb on the highway working class even as we want to get past identity politics. you want to talk about a referendum for the white working class and i want to say to the white working class, please, join, black, brown, red, yellow people, donald trump is not your friend. an administration that hires billionaires is it not your friend. the friends of the people who are working class are the institutions of government that are sensitive on the local level to them or unions that take into account what they're doing and progressive groups in the grass roots that are serious about it. so, yes, i wanted to challenge some unconscious bigotry and unconscious privilege that is in white america and say let's join forces together and not separate each other. >> 202 is the area code if you'd like to talk about author

michael eric dyson. and 202-748-8201, if you live in the mountain or out here in the pacific time zones. one more sentence from your book before we take goals. one of the greatest privileges of whiteness is to know the see color, to not see race and to not pay a price for ignoring it. >> that's right. many white americans say to black and brown people and others, why are you people so obsessed with race. if you want to get beyond race, stop seeing it. that's not a privilege we don't possess, we walk down the street we're reminded of it, police people remind it. people in jobs, can i touch your hair, it's different. your hair cannot be worn here if you have locks or dreds. there's a win where the microeye gregses, small slights, if they're microaggressions they're small.

a paper cut is small, but can bleed you to death. in this country, many americans aren't conscious if you have privilege. if even a poor white person, if you engage with police and that's not predicated on this, but white identity that may be respected in certain quarters. yes, i want to say that the privilege of not seeing race, i'm color blind, i don't see flig, that's another privilege. we have to in america acknowledge those differences and i don't want people to transcend race, i want them to transcend the bigoted things they believe about race. i don't want people to associate my blackness with things they think are negative. we can acknowledge our differences and common core of american values be obscured by black or brown or red or yellow, but the white equation has leveraged a tremendous

influence on the rest of landscape of american identity and ethnicity and what i'm trying to do is call attention to that. partly what it means to be white is not to know that you've been white, until somebody reminds you, not to think of race the way that black, brown, red and yellow people have been. >> michael eric dyson, and his recent book. let's hear from the audience. i should have warned you dr. dyson, we'll hear a delay, but it will be fine. >> okay. >> go ahead, colorado you're on book tv. >> caller: dr. dyson, a real privilege. i wonder if you could comment on the privatization of prisons, seems important to me that they stay under public oversight. with the trump administration, i wonder if you could comment on that with race relations. i enjoyed your interview this week. >> host: thank you, bill in

boulder. >> guest: no, it's an extremely important point you're making. this is unprecedented in an era when we've had unprecedented things before us. and barack obama being the first black president in the nation. and donald trump bringing his family on board not disclosing the nature of his affiliations with certain businesses especially on foreign soil. we don't know the extent to which president trump is involved with russia, for instance, and that has grave and serious foreign policy consequences, and even in america, refusing to acknowledge on our own soil some of his relationships to economic interests. the refusal to acknowledge and to disclose his tax returns obscures for the american public and this great republic the financial interests that this president has. that's only one small segment of it and slice of it, but the

caller is absolutely right. the privatization of the american presidency when we need public oversight. donald trump resorts to twitter to display and disclose his innermost thoughts and refusing to engage in the political substance of shaping policy that will have a serious consequence and debating it back and forth. i think it's one of the most powerful negative consequences. >> host: i didn't hear it clear, but producer back in washington he was talking about the privatization of prisons. >> guest: prisons, i thought he was talking about the president. the prisons more so, i hope that was a fruitful mishearing, but the privatization of prisons was problematic. it didn't begin under president trump, but it continues apace and we see now, with the attorney general sessions reigniting the war on drugs, which is the war on black and brown people, which is an increase in the privatization of prisons, that is farming out

to individual entrepreneurs or collective entrepreneurs in our culture who are seeking to take hold of the business of warehousing people. we know that the disproportionate number of black and brown people in the prisons suggest the privatization of imprisonment, means a greater entrepreneurial stake in the control and black and brown bides in these spaces and poor white communities which are the beneficiaries of the privatization of prisons, means that there's a direct transfer of wealth from our economy into the coffers of working class white communities, all to the bain of the existence of black and brown people. and the privatization of them ultimately in a place like california where the super max prison and others along with privatization, has been a scourge on american democracy. >> host: michael eric dyson is also a professor of socialology at georgetown university in washington. carolyn in broken arrow, oklahoma, you're on the air. >> caller: good morning. i could not disagree with you

more in everything that you've said. i have watched you and many of the other black leaders mislead these people for years. i am a 78-year-old white woman and i have worked with every color in the world. and we could get along except that you and some black leaders keep wanting to tell other black citizens how deprived they are, when, quite frankly, right now, they have more money, more industries, more leadership in the television, the papers, the magazines, they're being hired ahead of other people because of their color, and quite frankly, i wish you'd stop all of this hate speech that you keep telling these people because this is not right. >> host: thank you, carolyn we're going to get an answer from michael eric dyson in a second. would you consider buying his

book "tears we cannot stop" no i wouldn't because quite frankly it would be more of the poor white people getting money off of the blacks, so why would i want to hear about how i'm taking advantage of them. >> host: thank you, ma'am. >> thank you for being forthright and honest in your beliefs. i think that this is the alternative universe that we live in now. with all due respect to you, the fact that you have created there nothing in regard to reality. the fact is that black and brown people do not control any industry in america, know the even the recording industry in which they participate in extraordinary numbers. when you look at the industry of america, there's not one industry that black and brown people lead in except in being in prison so where are all the black and brown people who are the presidents of major american corporations? where are the black and brown people in control of fortune 500. where are the block people in the fortune 500. when you break it down that's

not true. when you look at ordinary african-american people versus white people, the number of people who are wealthy demolishes and pales in comparison. beyond that, when you look at the household wealth of black and brown versus white people, again, black people pale in comparison. in no index that we vote, substantiated claim of wealth from white america to black america can be really supported or substantiated by your argument. so i would ask the caller to think seriously, blacks and brown people are not getting jobs ahead of while people. affirmative action is the policy that you might be referring to, but the police departments are still disproportionately white. the fire departments are still disproportionately white. construction workers are disproportionately white. when you look at every major profession in america there's no substantive increase in

black and latin american people when you look at senators cross the board. unfortunately this is what donald trump brought us. alternative universe is a fact and a kind of fake news and unfortunately, white supremacist and white innocence, ask you even if you don't buy my book, go to the library and see that i'm a the predicament hf the white people. martin luther king, jr. was in jail and white jailer came to him like an alternative fact like you're suggesting, you know what, dr. king, segregation is right and integration is wrong and your movement is wrong. dr. king said, no, that's not true. and then dr. king asked the poor white people how much money do you make? and after they told him he said, well, my god, you need to be out there marching with us. why? because you're just as poor as we are. you have more in common with working class black and brown people than you have in common

with the white overlords and captains of industry like the once who have been put in office as a result of president trump where you have billionaires like betty devos and extraordinary rich people like rex tillerson and other captains of industry who are helming our government now. there is much more in common between working class and poor white people and working class and brown and black people as well. >> host: michael eric dyson's most recent book "tears we cannot stop" a sermon to white america. his book last year, president obama, april 4, 1968, martin luther king, jr.'s death and how it changed america came out in 2008. the next call for him is tammy in kingston, north carolina. hi, sammy. >> caller: how are you doing? when senator, republican senator made a statement that-- to make president obama secede

his last eight years, to me that was tantamount to during the civil war, it set a tone for the declaration of succession from the union. the people today kind of like that, the republican party in general is that for the last eight years of president obama's term they did everything to-- and you just imagine if we worked together how better the country would have been at today. >> yes, no, i think that's an extraordinarily important point. there's been a kind of internal succession among certain far right groups, seceding from america, not literally, not necessarily politically, in terms of organization, but politically, in terms of belief and ideals, the spectrum of ideas and the entire spectra of ideology suspects that the far right wants to secede from the

nation and repudiate and reject what we maintain in our collective breath as the best of americans. the succession led many to believe they're apart from america because they believe they're superior to what is left in the vast hinterland of america. that's a problem and your point about president obama facing such extraordinary odds, no doubt about that. when mitch mcconnell said i want to make him a one-term president, when people met on the first day of inauguration of obama's first term and tried to plot, newt gingrich among them, how to make him a one-term president. this is not investment in america, this is not patriotism expressed. we have political differences, but all of us should want the united states of america to succeed. if we have differences with the president we should articulate like i have those differences with president trump, i do not want to subvert or distort americans projects, and succeed from the nation. i want to stay here and

reconstitute it according to the idea i have. i think it's extremely important to acknowledge the birther movement that took place under barack obama's presidency led by the present president of the united states of america were some of the most hideous and viciousness of ideology. the true democrats, small d, the true republicans, small r are those to american society, yes, arguing about our differences, but ultimately keeping the fabric of our union together. >> host: sal from north dakota. >> caller: good afternoon, gentlemen. i'm native american and live on th this reservation, racism is alive and well in north dakota

and as far as how the government has treated native americans throughout history, i mean, native means native americans. we were the first people here. we were. let me point out a couple of things that the government has, i feel, wrongly treated the native americans, let's go back to the flooding of the garrison dam, how the natives were flourishing on the bottom lands, crops were good. everything was good. with the flooding of the garrison dam, they took away, moved all the native americans up to higher ground. we're not farmers, okay? we were meant to live off the land. moving there just put us in a whole different area. number two, i'd like to bring up is the pipeline in standing rock. how the government handles that, i think, was really, really-- i mean, racism all around. let me point out-- >> now, sal, i tell you what, sal, let's leave it at that two, but let me ask you a

question. that was all during the obama administration, right? >> well, my -- i'd have to as zebra never changes its colors. i mean, what i mean by that is, regardless of administration, racism is still going to be here regardless and all-- >> let's hear from dr. dyson, thank you very much, sal. >> no, i think he's making-- sal is making an extraordinarily powerful point and the point you raised at the end that it was a the obama administration. and sal pointed out a zebra doesn't change its stripes. policies to first nation people are abhorrent. and we know that president obama addressed this and was far more progressive, but not nearly as effective as necessary in order to address some of the undergirding underlying assumptions. even with immigration, people

tend to forgot that obama was known as supporter in chief for quite a while so there are contradictions involved. even under a democratic president, in regard to some of the practice towards native people. so the far more grave point, far for important point, first nation people have not been recognized practices of racism and group identity against the interests of first nations peoples needs to be addressed and it's more than let's give them bingo stands and casinos to get rid of them. it's the fundamental practice of justice and two things he mentioned along with pipelines established and driven under their sacred grounds and impeding on native territories and not only not recognizing their sovereignty, but humanity. when we talk about black lives matter, red lives matter, yellow lives matter, brown lives matter. all of these have been shoveled into the periphery, he makes a powerful point and we have to figure out ways to address

systematically the plight of native people in this country. >> host: a few minutes left with our guest. dona donald, you're on the air. >> caller: i want to know, mr. dyson, this is something shared with all of america, the many reasons for all of our problems is because of slavery. if you look at slavery how it's affected america, if you look at oppression, segregation, discrimination, all of those things have been generated by slavery. we learned about slavery and about racism all through slavery and where-- and we never-- you have to realize it was legal. our government made it legal to segregate, lynch, all with slaves and call that racism and prejudice through all other races, all other immigrants-- >> all right, donald, thank you very much. michael eric dyson. >> guest: yeah, look it's a

very compelling and powerful point. some would argue it began and pre-dated slavery. the ideology fueled slave ry in the planter class, and sub bort nated. he's right. there's lingering racism in in country and even in terms of the history we' peel to. in my book america loves history when it's about recreations of the civil war, when it talks about abraham lincoln or benjamin franklin, how many more books will we have? and god bless them many more aspects that need to be interrogated. when it comes to the history of black and brown people, stop, can't you stop dealing with history or talking about the past? wait a minute, i thought you were addicted to the past, recreating the civil wars and its battles. i think that gore vidale had it right, we live in the united

states of amnesia and i would add the theme song supplied by barbara streisand, sorry for those who only to taylor swift. look her up. what's too painful we choose to forget. we're addicted to forgotfulness, we have amnesia when it comes to serious issues that challenge american society dangerous society embedded in people of color, if you will, minorities in this country so i think that slavery is a metaphor and for us to talk about the fact that, yeah, we don't want to deal with the fact that there were enslaved people, that there was segregation predicated on the enslavement and black people constituted three fifth of a white person in calculus and mathematics, if you will, citizenship in this country. when we look at the consequences of slavery to this day, many people say why don't you people stop talking about slavery? well, we can't stop talking about slavery because we can't stop talking about the consequences of that enslavement and social

relations to this date, poor housing, poor education, poor health, are the lingering manifestations of the vicious persistence of difference in this country that drove slavery and that continues to manifest itself with lethal intensity in america today. >> host: from page 92 of "tears we cannot stop", the reason black lives matter needs to be shouted because american history ignored black history, didn't tell black stories, the founding documents of american society didn't include black lives. when black folks say, black lives matter, they are in search of simple recognition. let's hear from jonathan in glenn cove, new york, about a minute left. >> caller: oh, hi, welcome, dr. dyson. i'd like to make an observation, i know some people, i think, don't realize the extent to which their are sort of racial overtones in society.

i'm a blind person and ordinarily in conversations, i tend to hear differences in how people speak. sometimes if i hear a group of friends, you know, people who have been friends for a long time talking, it really only takes a few minutes before i start to get an impression that one person in the conversation has darker skin or something. you can hear it in how long people speak or who's ideas are affirmed, or things like that. but i'd also like to say i hear it, really much more among older people and i don't hear it very much among young people at all. so, i think, you know, that's something that may be changing. >> right, so, as extremely important port. aural dimension of assignment of values and the way we speak to each other not out of a common empathy for the other, but sometimes with assigned privileges and assigned deficits.

hopefully, as the generations emerge, and younger people rise up, that we will begin to really tone down the decibels of hatred and elevate or at least amplify the dimensions of common humanity that should be the predicate for everything that occurs in our country. >> host: let's hear one more voice, this is karen, ocean park, washington. hi, karen. >> caller: hi. dr. dyson, you are so inspiring to me. thank you so much. i have no questions because you seem to answer all of them. thank you so much. and keep up the good work. do not die before i do. i am the same age as that lady from oklahoma and i totally disagree. i've had a very cosmopolitan experience and i have experienced, i have experienced and seen the racism and the bigotry and it's there. fortunately, here where i live or at least in the state of washington, we're a little more, quote, liberal thinking,

at least superficially. we hide it well. thank you so much for being-- and keep up the good work. >> guest: well, god bless you for your wonderful words. i hope you live to be at least 150 and god bless you in your sentiments and passions. it's because of people like sister karen, who despite the incredible odds of bigotry in our culture in the time which she was reared that she spoke out against them and that she lives in a neighborhood and in a part of the country where people see it as a necessity to openly and honestly address some of the brutal differences that we have and yet, take responsibility for them and then open up to new avenues and new horizons of transformation. that gives me heart. i've received so many letters from white brothers and sisters because of this book saying